About

Dear Reader, welcome to my blog. I’m really blessed and humbled that you’ve taken the time to visit here. We, my husband Maré Mouton and I, Annalize, our two dogs, a cat, and presently also my youngest son, live in Stanford, a beautiful village in the Cape Overberg of South Africa. I love this photo of me on the top of the Houwhoek Mountains near Bot River, because in a sense it’s a prophetic picture that in Him, Christ Jesus, I’ve made it! And it also serves as an “urge on” to keep looking forward and upward, to keep running the race and press on toward the goal for the prize of the high, upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Somewhat like the song, “Climb every mountain” from the Sound of Music: Climb every mountain, search high and low, follow every byway, every path you know… ford every stream, follow every rainbow, ’till you find your dream. A dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live.

A dream that would ask everything and cost everything, because the dream burningly alive in me, is Christ Jesus Himself, our Exceeding Great Reward, our Promised Land, our only Hope of Glory, the Pearl of Great Price, fully formed in and manifested through this clay pot. Nothing or no-one else would or could satisfy this longing heart!

Maré and I

Many old friends and new ones have asked me for the story of my life. And seeing that it actually always is His Story being expressed and lived through us, the earthen vessels, I never knew how to do this in a manner that would bring all the glory to Him only and also would be just and right to every person who have been, and still are a part of my life. I knew that I needed a higher perspective than an earthly one. I knew that the only way that I could ever look at my past and discern everything and everyone justly, and be filled with thankfulness and joy and peace, and immense gratitude, kindness and mercy towards my family and friends and all the rest, would be to view all from His perspective, looking from within His heart through His eyes from out of the Finished Work of the Cross of Jesus Christ. I needed to see Jesus Christ as the God who is All in All, and in all of us. And it is so amazing that since I started writing about “my life”, beginning way back with some of the many generations that have gone before, I have seen more and more that it is ultimately the story of His faithfulness and love, His mercy and goodness. He indeed is a God who keeps covenant and shows His love to the thousandth generation, and He has done it all by Himself. It is truly as the Word says: Not by power, nor by might, but by His Spirit.

By something more than faith, a deep, settled knowing within, I now see us all and everything pertaining to our earthly lives, all the people, all the circumstances, all the good and the bad, the joy and the pain, the successes and the failures, all gathered and summed up into Him, and I see us all already seated with Christ in heavenly places. He has brought us Home into His and our Father’s heart, our eternal Dwelling Place. And by His grace I am filled with a peace that passes understanding and a great joy in the midst of extremely fiery trials. To me any other way of looking at life here on this earthly plane would not only have echoed the shout of the author of Ecclesiastes, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless…”, but it would also have resulted in a self-indulgent stroll down the Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, like a dog returning to its vomit, a pig rolling around in the muck again with demons and disasters, lesser loves and lovers, sickness and death, crooks and villains, hatred, bitterness and pain, and me either turning out to be the worst of them all, or trying to establish myself as Snow White, slinging mud at everyone else and relishing the role of victim! Yes, I was the worst sinner. Yes, I have been terribly ashamed of myself at times. Yes, I have been manipulated and abused and have done the same to others. Yes, there were many mistakes, and failures and sickness and death, and tears, and pain and suffering. Yes, there once existed a record of me missing the mark of being a fully yielded vessel pouring forth His Perfect Love, but by His amazing grace God has now made me a partaker of the very life of Christ! He has forgiven me all my sins: Christ has utterly wiped out the damning evidence of broken laws and commandments which always hung over my head, and has completely annulled it by nailing it over His own head on the cross. And He has drawn the sting of all the powers ranged against me, exposed them, shattered, empty and defeated, in His final glorious triumphant act! Now, I see only Him in my own and every other face in the picture gallery on the walls of my heart, and all of us not only instruments in the hands of the Creator God, the Master Builder and Potter, but beloved children of a loving Father! Through the precious blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, He has made us who were once alienated from the life of God, and enemies of Him, sons and daughters of Him, kings and priests to the Most High God. We are His body through whom He is working and bringing His many sons and daughters home gloriously, making His face to shine on us, and through whom He will establish His Kingdom on this earth and through whom He will rule and reign. And He is perfecting His love and forgiveness in me, and I am ever learning to fully live and rest in Him and His unfathomable love and absolute forgiveness, and of seeing every circumstance and situation as coming to us straight from His Hand sifted through the sieve of His perfect love, knowledge and wisdom. And I am fully persuaded that He through His own faithfulness and power, is working everything towards our ultimate Good! Though tears might still stream from my eyes, my weeping now is because His amazing love wrecks me, and in His Presence I am undone. He has turned my mourning into dancing. For me the Son of Righteousness has arisen with healing in His wings!

And with a heart that is filled and overflowing more and more with Him and His love, I can honestly say that I love Him, the Lover of my Soul, with everything that is me. He, my Maker, is also my Father, my best Friend, my constant Companion, my Confidant, my Everything and my only Desire. In Him, the Living Speaking One, the Consuming Fire, the One who not only planned, purposed and knitted me together in my mother’s womb, I live and move and have my being, and I know that He through His Spirit lives His own LIFE within and through me. Completely one with Him who is an Eternal Burning. He has heard the deepest cry of my heart: to KNOW Him; really, really know Him, to share His heart, to see with His eyes, to hear with His ears. And I know that when Christ appears, I shall be like Him, for I shall see Him as He is. And should anyone poke me, only LOVE will flow out of me in streams of living water, Liquid Love! He will make my life His love song and He will glorify Himself! And not only in me, but in all the lives that have touched and will touch mine. This is my prayer as His son in His Son, Jesus Christ. He the Dream-Giver, the only Dream-Fulfiller, my only Dream!

This road to the Father’s heart is an extremely narrow road. It is a road of processing, of breaking, filled with hardship, tribulation, persecutions, much suffering, pain, tears and loneliness. At times we might feel like the prophet Jeremiah: “O LORD, You have deceived me and I was deceived; You have overcome me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; Everyone mocks me.”  But with patient enduring and hearts and minds set on Him in all circumstances,  He will bring us to the place where we would say with the apostle Paul that “whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith [the faith of the Son of God in me]. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3:7–11

Yes, in Him I am more than a conqueror!!!! You are a conqueror. We are conquerors. Overcomers in the Overcomer, accepted and beloved in the Beloved.

Click on link here for: To a Thousand Generations

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